God is to us a God of deliverances; And to GOD the Lord belong escapes from death. (Psalm 68:20 NASB)

I am happy at this point of today… 🙂

I’ve been going through some pretty ‘dark’ times over the last few days…

Some of that ‘storm’ and it has been a really challenging time for me on the ‘inside’…

Waking up this morning and seeking the Lord and He has provided some clarity on the situation…

Waiting on the Lord means getting used to not ‘pulling any strings’ to orchestrate what He has said He will do…

Letting go of that innate desire to ‘assist’ God in bringing to pass what He has said…

I am glad that I’ve gone through these past few ‘dark’ days…

When I go through these times He seems to remind me of things I’ve blogged previously and I go back and again go, “Ahhaa…” and remember that I already knew this but have somehow seemed to practically forget it in the intervening time… 🙂

Shows there’s more deliverance to come…

Torment…

Think about your life and think about whether there are certain strands of it which torment you, things which go over and over and over in your mind…

These are the things which we haven’t surrendered to the Lord…

My latest ‘dark’ experiences clearly showed me this…

Torment is not from the Lord but from the enemy of our souls, the devil…

King Saul was tormented by an evil spirit after he refused to submit to the Lord’s word…

The Lord uses these experiences, for those of us who know Him, to bring out in us our new self which just ‘knows’ (after a while) – it just senses or perceives – that these patterns are not life-giving – they are actually death-giving…

This was the giveaway for me in this latest episode – the Lord sort of said, “Hold on a minute, this isn’t healthy”, through my new self and then I saw it…

Anything which we do to try and make anything happen, even if it is God’s will, is control…

Anything we try and do to manipulate or coerce someone into doing something, even if it is God’s will, is witchcraft…

Anything which the Lord has told us which we’ve believed but there’s been a part of our ‘sin which is within me’ which has also agreed with it because it just happens to look like that will benefit ‘sin which is within me’ also and then ‘sin which is within me’ goes about to try and make it happen for itself – keeping it on the ‘down low’ so our new self doesn’t notice – eventually we see it surfacing during one of these ‘dark’ times when everything seems to be falling apart and it is ‘exposed’ for what it is really trying to do…

The hardest thing in the world is to have heard from God that He is going to do something through you and someone else together, i.e. use you together to achieve something for His Glory, and then stand by powerlessly watching as this other person remains unwilling to participate in this activity, being unable to ‘touch’ them to try and ‘enlighten’ them…

The reason it’s hard is because there’s still a selfish motive in there for ‘sin which is within me’…

Once that selfish motive is removed and this is a pure submission thing where we trust the Lord explicitly that everything He puts us through is in love and for our good – then truly we are ‘all good’ and see that His timing is perfect and that He is enabling us to wait but that in our waiting He is preparing us to be ready to play our part in this partnership and He frees us from the delusion that we’re already ‘perfectly’ ready but the other party is not… 🙂

No matter what happens God still loves us, He is using everything to bring us into His likeness…

We must surrender to His truth because in aligning with His truth we practically experience His peace and are protected by His power to have our youth renewed and to live more and more and more escaping from death and experiencing His abundant life as we know Him on this earth – which is the greatest testimony to His Glory which we can give…

As we are enabled by the Holy Spirit let’s glorify the Lord by trusting Him with every sadness and anger, every disappointment and betrayal, every heartbreak and unfulfilled longing, let’s trust Him with all our ‘unknowables’ and let’s let His truth set us free on the inside… 🙂

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:28 NASB)